Health boards urged to seek community solutions

The Health Minister says he wants local hospital and health boards to work with their communities to come up with solutions to local challenges.

Lawrence Springborg visited Longreach yesterday.

Mr Springborg says Commonwealth funding cuts have impacted on the health budget and most departmental job cuts have come from the central corporate office.

He says the State Government wants to improve rural services.

"Moves to reinstate rural birthing services, to bring back procedural and surgical services in some areas, we've just done that in Kingaroy, the first time in six years," he said.

"We are going to more than double the hours of the flying obstetrician and gynaecologist from 400 to 1,000 hours over the next couple of years, so they are all extremely important initiatives."

Mr Springborg says Commonwealth funding cuts have had a "dramatic" impact on the health budget.

He says the Commonwealth has cut more than $100 million in funding and there are now 1,200 fewer people working in the central corporate office and local boards are working through their own local challenges.

"Generally the positions that have been lost have come from people who are putting up their hands for voluntary redundancies and in many cases we've got more applications than we have positions," he said.

The North-West Hospital and Health Service board says it is still working through cuts to its budget.

Chairman Paul Woodhouse says the service needs to reduce its budget by $1.44 million.

He says staff will be the first to know if there are cuts to jobs or services.

"We've been very clear day one to all of our staff that we'll be open honest and transparent with all of our staff," he said.

"The fact that we've taken so long about it is because there's particular demands with doing business in the north-west of Queensland or a remote or rural area anywhere in Australia I would imagine and staff are hard to get in the first place, so what we've been taking our time about is making sure we get it right."